Guitar Picking Techniques

Guitar picking techniques vary in both
application and difficulty and they can be very challenging..

This
lesson is designed to
help improve your confidence with several picking techniques,
all of which you'll most likely use throughout your guitar playing
life.

Firstly,
make sure you equip yourself with a fairly soft plectrum (I use .88mm)
that can flex
over the strings with ease - a hard pick is likely to make this ten
times
more difficult than it should be.

Also, this is just a primer. A
lot of what we'll look at
here is covered in far more depth by the guys at JamPlay.

Economy picking warmup

This first section outlines the core basics of good picking practise
for both acoustic and electric guitar.

Learn to pick with down AND up
strokes. Many
guitarists that wouldn't class themselves as beginners at all still
only seem to want to pick down towards the floor.

One method is to use upstrokes when the sequence travels upwards
towards the higher strings, and
down strokes when the sequence travels towards the low E string. This
is known as
economy picking.

You can do this with any chord or lick, but in this example we're
picking the
Am7 chord.

If you look at the diagram
you'll notice we are down picking from the root
note down to the skinny E string and then coming back up with, yep,
upstrokes.

The general "rule" (it's more
of a "make life easier for you" kind of rule when
you're starting out) is that the direction of a stroke/pick
is determined by where the next string being played
in the sequence is. This is directly related to all the
following guitar picking techniques.

Onwards and upwards! Let's get
to grips with some solid guitar picking techniques...

Basic flat
picking technique

Flat picking is basically just plucking the strings of your guitar with
a
plectrum. The other method is
finger
picking.

Similar to the warm up, we're
going to stick with one chord - A7
- but this time we're going to do some string skips. This means we'll
start as though we're just picking down the chord, but 3 strings in
we're going to jump to the top E string to begin our upstrokes.

That's what it sounds like stripped down to just those key bass notes.

As long as you keep some sort
of strict rhythmic
control by identifying a couple of notes that have particular emphasis,
you'll be able to wrap the rest of the chord around it using
the appropriate up and down picks.

Notice how, like I said
before, stroke direction is determined by the position of the next
string you play
in the sequence to make the travel of your hand smoother.

Same thing, but moving
frets

So we'll start on that A7
chord like before, using that
same picking pattern, but this time we'll make it into a progression by
moving the shape up the neck.

It's difficult at first for many people to a) keep
your picking accurate at the same time as b)
fretting accurately with your other hand.

Again, I would rather you look
at your fretting hand
because at least the palm and most of your picking hand is stationary.
You will find you can naturally be quite accurate anyway with your picking
hand

It doesn't matter if you pick
the notes in the wrong order - just make
sure you downstroke and upstroke when you should be - if in doubt,
stop, take a look at what the next string
you play will be - if it's a fatter string, upstroke, if it's a
skinnier string, downstroke.

Picking open string chords

This is a flat picking technique
where you play a couple of
notes fretted, and the rest open. The open strings should ring out to
give some depth to the sequence.

With floating, select two or three of the bottom, fattest strings at
frets 3, 5 and/or 7
and use these as bass notes.

Now, because these notes at
those frets are in the key of E minor you can float
them up and down the fretboard whilst picking the top
skinniest strings. These top 3 strings make up the main part
of the E minor chord and will complement the bass strings played at
those frets.

Listen again to the audio -
that's what I'm doing in this example.

Experiment with playing
strings at different frets and picking some of, or all the other
strings around them.
You can discover all sorts of wonderful open string
chords here.

Floating is about taking 1, 2
or 3 fretted strings and combining them with open strings.

String
skipping picking technique

String skipping is yet another picking technique that is pretty self
explanatory.

In a nutshell, string skipping
involves jumping over, or "skipping" strings when moving vertically,
from one string to another. It allows for wider interval movements,
jumping from low to high
tones, giving your chord playing more dynamic patterns.

We're picking the G Major and C Major chords here, detailed in the tab
above.

You'll notice that the picking
follows an alternate
pattern, so in the first part I'll pick the bass/root string as usual
followed by the E, D and G string, but in the next part I pick E, G and
B. This alternate
pattern is very common with all guitar picking techniques.

The cross picking part is
obvious - the jump from the bass/root string right up to the top string
before jumping back
down to the D string. The same upstroke/downstroke "rules" apply here
too!

Of course, this can be done
with chord progressions
as well so have a wander around the fretboard with this pattern.
Changing chord position whilst
you're making that "jump" with your picking can sound really effective
if played right...

Picking
through more defined chord changes

Floating chord changes as we saw earlier aren't actually big movements
in the way of changing your finger formation.

The audio and tab diagram
below lay out a picking pattern that weaves through a more obvious
chord change.

Dm7 changes to a modified G chord (used a lot in jazz).
However, the important thing here is, you've kept that picking pattern
and rhythm through the chord change (i.e. the chord change didn't break
up your picking rhythm).

It's good practice for your
accuracy and co-ordination
to use this method often, especially when string skipping, because it
involves both your picking hand and (more so) your fretting hand making
significant movements together and not breaking up
the rhythm or accuracy in the
process.